5A Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26, Interruptions, June 11, 2023

5A Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26 Interruptions, June 11, 2023

It is five o’clock Friday afternoon at Children’s Hospital. A young child with vague symptoms presents to the radiology department, just as I am almost out the door to go home after a long week. A routine ultrasound shows a large abdominal mass that most assuredly is cancer, the bad kind. I try to tell the mom we need more tests, walk them to the Emergency Department to her pediatric resident and staff, and suggest next steps./ The patient who presents at five o’clock on Friday routinely has a serious illness. Their mother has just gotten off work and notices something wrong when she hugs her. My day at the hospital is extended. I soon learn in my medical practice to pay attention to these interruptions. Another physician who calls or comes to see me usually has something more important than the issue I am working on. I hope I was as available to medical students, but probably not always.

I identify with one of Henri Nouwen’s stories.

While visiting the University of Notre Dame, he meets with an older professor./ As they stroll the campus, the professor tells him with a certain melancholy, “You know, my whole life, I have been complaining that my work is constantly interrupted/ until I finally discovered that my interruptions were my work.”1

Living a life of interruptions is not easy. I always have a to-do list, like most of you. I rarely get through it. There was a time in my practice, as I became more successful, when my thoughts began to be filled with hubris. “I am a very important doctor. I need someone to screen these interruptions. I will call them back at my convenience.” I soon learn I miss opportunities to help or heal or learn more crucial information about a child I am evaluating if I don’t stop to listen.///

Jesus’ life is one of constant interruptions. I don’t know how he does it.

Today we hear one more story of the constant daily intrusions into his life./ Our story starts out with Jesus interrupting Matthew as he sits at his tax booth.

The Pharisees then ungraciously interrupt their dinner by critically asking the disciples why Jesus eats with sinners and tax collectors. Note they make triangles/ and do not ask Jesus directly. But Jesus hears them and interrupts their triangulation, suggesting their clock is wound up backward. He quotes words from the prophet Hosea that we just heard (6:6). Jesus’ mission is to heal wounds, show mercy, and forgive sins, not minister to those who think they are well.

While Jesus tries to finish the best meal he has had all week, he is suddenly interrupted again by a synagogue leader. He kneels before him, pleading that his daughter has died. “Come and lay hands on her, and she will live.” Jesus instantly leaves the table to go with him. Then suddenly, a woman who has been hemorrhaging for twelve years interrupts their abortive journey by touching the fringe of his cloak. Jesus turns around and heals her. “Take heart, daughter. Your faith has healed you.” Jesus then interrupts the customary paid mourners around the dead child’s home and interrupts the young girl’s “sleep” as he takes her by the hand/ and brings her back to the living./

Jesus meets people where they are, living or dead, not where he is. He operates in the present moment. No call waiting or call back later or make an appointment.

Again, how does he do it? He gets help. He has at least twelve followers. But after their three-year residency, they don’t seem ready to take their specialty boards./

We never hear about Jesus’ weekend vacations to recharge. We do hear about his attempts to sleep on boat rides, but he is again interrupted. But he does like to eat, always at other people’s homes. He reinforces how meals build relationships. Food nourishes and changes our bodies, but also nourishes relationships in some way that is not the same as simply sitting together around a table and talking./ Today, we also hear that Jesus eats with sinners like ourselves./

How does Jesus heal in these constant interruptions?

Miracle stories always produce more questions than answers.

Jesus touches, especially outcasts. His interaction is personal. His presence may be something like what I have experienced with a handful of people in my lifetime. When you talk with them, you feel like you are the only person in the room. You have their total attention. You begin to live in the present moment with them.

How does Jesus have the energy to do all this without a break in these constant interruptions?

Look more closely at the healing stories. Does Jesus say, “I have healed you?” Today it is “your faith has made you well.”

What about raising the child from death? Was it the faith of her father that brought about the miracle? Jesus never mentions for people to let others know that he, the great Physician, performs the miracle.

 Jesus models that he is so connected to God, the Father, that he has become a channel of God’s power to love and heal each person he meets, whatever he is doing.//

We are now aware that this resurrected Christ is also within us. This is huge. That power of love and healing is now within us.

How does Jesus stay connected to this love and healing power? We know how this happens. There are almost thirty verses in the New Testament where Jesus goes off to a quiet place and prays./ When I tire of the interruptions in my life, I know this is a true sign that I am not connected to God’s love, particularly in my prayer life. I must stop and reboot my rule of life.

My experience is that I have an agenda, but I am slowly, often painfully, learning that God continually meets me in the interruptions in my life that are not on my schedule. When I ignore a call from a friend or family member when I think I am too busy to talk, this is a sure sign that I am in trouble, losing priority of what life is all about. Interruptions are like stop or yield signs to go off script and listen for a grace note. Nouwen calls them opportunities for hospitality and novel experiences. When I return to a project after an interruption, I usually have fresh ideas. But that false notion keeps speaking in my ear that if I stop, I will lose my creativity or train of thought./

Interruptions remind us of how powerless we are. If we think we are in charge, interruptions remind us this is a myth. When I seal myself off and refuse to respond to anything but what is on my schedule, I become exponentially isolated. My world, my God, becomes too small. I become the center of the universe and fossilized. That is when I develop that high hubris titer./

 When we are open to the interruptions in our lives, we begin to see miracles happening all around us, in medicine, in recovery groups,/ healing, which interrupts lives when all seems hopeless. Those desperately caught in an addiction go into recovery. A child or adult survives an infectious disease like tuberculosis, diphtheria,/ or cancer that would have killed them fifty, ten, or five years ago. The child I first meet on a Friday at five,/today has a chance.

Interruptions always bring us back to live in the present moment, where God likes to abide. We become aware of what is happening directly around us in our life,/ instead of living into what is going on in our heads in the past or future.

One last story reminds us about the power of God’s love, the resurrected Christ within us that we now share when we live into the interruptions presented to us in our surroundings,/ living like Jesus in the present moment where miracles happen./ The resurrected Christ within us/ in each present moment/ reaffirms the incarnation,/ the Word made flesh./ We now connect to the presence of the Divine Risen One in our body.

Richard Selzer, distinguished Yale surgeon, wrote in his book Mortal Lessons about operating on a young woman with a cancerous growth on her cheek. Unfortunately, he must cut the nerve controlling the muscles of her mouth.

Looking at her misshapen mouth in the mirror, she asks him, “Will this always be this way?” He replies, “Yes.” /She then nods and lies there quietly.

But her young husband quickly bends over her,/ smiles/ and says, /“I like it.”

Then he shapes his mouth to hers/ and kisses her to show that their kiss still works./ Selzer writes that in that brief moment, he is looking through an open window into the healing presence of the living God.

And, of course, he is. Because the work of the Great Physician comes to us in the twisted shapes and interruptions in our lives/ to shape his love/ to fit us/ and to pour/ his love into us.// May this healing power be yours.2

1 Henri Nouwen in Reaching Out: The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life (Image Books, 1975), p. 52.

2Samuel T. Lloyd III in “The Miracle of Healing,” a sermon at The National Cathedral, February 8, 2009.

Joanna Seibert https://www.joannaseibert.com/

12 step Eucharist Trinity C, Great Commission and the 12th step, St. Mark's Episcopal Church, Little Rock Arkansas, 5:30 pm June 7, 2023

Trinity C June 7, 2023

Twelve-Step Eucharist St. Mark’s

Great Commission and the 12th step

Tonight, we hear the Great Commission from Matthew. On a mountaintop in Galilee, Jesus tells his disciples and us to go into the world and share the good news of God’s love reaching out to others. The last sentence is also crucial. He reminds us we will not be alone. He will be with us always to the end of the age. The resurrected Christ will always be beside, above, and inside us as we take this journey.

There is also a great commission in recovery. It is the 12th step: “Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these Steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.” I also like the way it is put in Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions: “Our society has concluded that it has but one high mission---to carry the A.A. message to those who don't know there's a way out.” (page 151)

 Neither the 12th step nor the Great Commission is optional. If we do not continue to learn from the experience of other Christians and share God’s love which we have received, we become stale and isolated and do not grow. We stay in recovery by practicing the lessons we have learned in all parts of our life, and by telling our stories. When we stop connecting the 12 steps to all aspects of our lives and reaching out to others, we lose our sobriety. Bill Wilson, one of the co-founders of AA, found out he could only stay sober by meeting with and sharing his story with others seeking recovery. One of the first persons he told his story to was a physician in Akron, Ohio, Dr. Bob Smith, on the Monday after Mother’s Day. I once visited Dr. Bob’s house and sat in the upstairs bedroom where the two men met in 1935 to begin a program that saved my life before I was born. Before any of you here were born. That afternoon in Akron in an upper room was a spiritual experience that could have some similarities to being on a mountaintop in Galilee.

Both the Great Commission and the 12th step call us to community. We are cared for and healed by staying connected and reaching out to others in our community. Those in recovery know we were not able to become clean and sober on our own will power after years of trying. Christians continue to learn about Jesus by hearing the message from the experience of others. Here again, we see one of the million ways God heals and cares for us as we reach out to heal and care for others, relating to others in community/ and simply telling our story.

Joanna Seibert

12-Step Eucharist Being Saved by the Good Shepherd, Easter 4A, St. Mark's Episcopal Church, Little Rock, May 3, 2023 5 pm

Being Saved by the Good Shepherd

12-step Eucharist Wednesday, May 3, 2023, Easter 4A

John 10:1-10

“Whoever enters by me will be saved, and will come in and go out and find pasture.. I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.”

In Richard Rohr’s blog,/ James Finley talks about being saved as the paradoxical power that comes from admitting we are powerless. /When we take the First Step: “We admit we are powerless and our lives have become unmanageable.” The First Step is admitting…. If we admit,/ we’re admitted. If we don’t admit,/ we’re not admitted. If we admit, we live; and if we don’t admit,/ we may die. (Repeat)

Why is admitting so extremely painful when the very thing that’s so painful is the very thing that saves our lives?

Hitting bottom is what most often precedes admitting/ and makes admitting possible. It’s excruciating to admit that our lives have become unmanageable because we all need a sense of control. We all need to believe, “Look, I have handled so many other things. I can handle this.”  It is the admitting that is such a painful experience. The admitting brings us to a place where we recognize that it is not looking good/ if this is all up to us. If this is up to us, we see despair. Finley says the fact that we’ve risked despair opens up a whole new possibility because maybe it’s not up to us. Maybe/ there’s another way.  

The Second Step of the Twelve Steps is: “We came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.”  To lead us to life,  an abundant life./

John of the Cross says, “When we can still see a little bit of light, we will resist guidance;/ but when we cannot see at all, we will stretch forth our hands and be led to unknown places where we don’t know how to go.” This is indeed what admitting can do for us. Admitting is poverty of spirit; it is experiential humility. The act of admitting, then, opens up this paradoxical faith.  

Finley believes all of us on this healing journey in relationship to our Higher Power will finally come to say to God: “You know, /I don’t know who you are, /but I do know who you are: you’re the one who saved my life./ And I don’t know who I am, either,/ but I do know: I’m the one you saved.”  

 James Finley in Mystical Sobriety, an online course with the Center for Action and Contemplation. https://cac.org/online-education/mystical-sobriety/

Joanna Seibert

Easter 4A John 10:1-10 Wendell Berry's Good Shepherd St. Mark's Episcopal Church, Little Rock 5 pm

Easter 4A John 10:1-10, Good Shepherd Wendell Berry

 St. Mark’s 5 o’clock

Good Shepherd from “The Desirable Woman” by Wendell Berry

Laura Milby is a minister’s wife in Wendell Berry’s short story, “ A Desirable Woman.” She is loved from afar by a young man, Tom Coulter, who is in her husband’s congregation called The Little Flock. Tom works on the farm of Naomi and Ernest Russet, also members of The Little Flock Church. Laura and her husband’s favorite place to dine on Sundays after church is at the Russet’s farm. You see, in Port William, Kentucky, the congregation members rotate feeding their minister and his wife every Sunday in their homes. Berry describes these Sunday dinners as “food heaped on the table as they/ (the minister and his wife) were urged to eat/ as if they were being fattened for slaughter/ or as if it were the known practice of ministers and their wives/ to eat only on Sundays.”1

Laura’s practice is to follow these dinners with a walk alone over the land owned by her hosts. This Sunday at the Russets, she happens onto two pastures and a row of pens in the lambing barn. In one pasture are the new lambs safely born and strong,/ and in another pasture are the ewes waiting to give birth to their lambs. She walks into the barn and sees Tom Coulter, who has just midwifed the birth of twin lambs. One baby lamb is lying in the straw, perfectly formed but dead, and the other is bonded and feeding on its mother, who is nuzzling and muttering to her live lamb.

Tom is the “hired hand,” but not the thief or the bandit, but a good shepherd who deeply cares for his sheep. As Laura sees Tom’s tenderness with the dead and live lamb, she suddenly is filled with love for the eternal “unthanked care of the good shepherd.2 The sheep merely suffer, live, die, and are oblivious to the care given them by the shepherd. They do not seem to appreciate the care they receive from the good shepherd, but still the shepherd passionately gives the care. Laura responds to this by saying to Tom, “You’re in love, aren’t you?”

Tom gives a boyish grin and says, “I thought you knew it, (but) I didn’t look for you to say so.”

Laura’s response is, “I would like to thank you.” 

They say no more, and Tom goes off to war to “lay down his life” and never returns, unlike the Good Shepherd.

Wendell Berry gives us an abiding image of the Good Shepherd, who deeply loves and cares for us. We, in turn, don’t ask for the care but receive it/ and, most often, are unaware of the care from this Shepherd who passionately and desperately loves us.

 The Good Shepherd tells us, “I came that you may have life, and have it abundantly.”

 All the Shepherd hopes for is that we, like Laura, acknowledge the Shepherd’s loves, saying to him, “You’re in love,/ aren’t you.” 

But even then, the Shepherd sheepishly grins, responding, “I thought you knew it/, but I didn’t look for you to say so.”///

Laura’s response to the Good Shepherd should continually be ours, “I would like to thank you.” Gratitude. That is why we are here today, giving gratitude for how the Good Shepherd cares for us. That is at the heart of our service today. A life of gratitude can make all the difference in our relationship with the Good Shepherd, ourselves, and those around us. May these words daily be on our lips,

“I would like to thank you.” 

1Wendell Berry, “A Desirable Woman,” A Place in Time, Twenty Stories of the Port William Membership, p. 57.

2Ibid, p. 67-68.

Karen Montana's Funeral Homily March 31, 2023, St. Mark's

Karen Montana homily March 31, 2023, St. Mark’s

 Karen’s St. Mark’s family knew her only for the last four years of her life. But we are all stunned by her death. Her quiet, cheerful, loving, thoughtful presence impacted this whole church, as rarely experienced in such a brief time. The enormity of Karen’s loving presence was most evident when our chapel was packed with standing room only/ by people called spontaneously to pray for her and share their grief last Sunday after her death./ 

The story of Karen’s presence here is a God thing. Karen mourned deeply the death of her 26-year-old son, Jeremy, in 2002, and then the death of her husband, John, on Christmas Eve 2018. Her physician told her about St. Mark’s grief group, Walking the Mourner’s Path. Karen decided to take a chance with us. Each participant has a prayer partner who holds them in prayer for the program’s eight weeks. Participants meet their prayer partners at the closing Eucharist in the final session. Mary Hines, who grieved her husband, Marion’s death, participated in Mourner’s Path the year before and was randomly selected to be Karen’s partner. They met for the first time at that Eucharist,/ shared their common stories/ and began regular lunches together. Mary invited Karen to church at St. Mark’s,/ and something clicked. The two sat together for the next four years on the third row from the front, on the other side of this aisle. I loved watching one come in, leave room for the other, who arrived a little later, and was immediately met with a hug. It was a constant sign that love was visibly present in this congregation. This story of love occurred Sunday after Sunday. Karen soon became incorporated in more ministries than I can name. /

Karen’s story at St. Mark’s was a universal model of God’s love and redemption. Out of Karen’s grief, she listened to someone she trusted and reached out to this community. She was led to attend church here by someone praying for her, leading to new friends and a new way of life. Karen, in turn, shared her huge heart, her huge heart, with the rest of us.// 

Funeral sermons should be about resurrection. I don’t need to explain resurrection this morning because Karen’s life is a resurrection story. Her deep sorrow and grief were transformed into a love in this congregation that will never die,/ even when all of us are forgotten. Her love has become part of the DNA of this congregation, just as it is a part of her family’s DNA for generations to come. She so loved her daughter, Laurie, and her husband, Michael. She adored her grandchildren, AJ, Everett, Hayley, and Kate./  

Remember the reading from I Corinthians. Paul tells us love never dies. Love is the only thing we leave on this earth and the only thing we also take with us into life beyond death. Laurie told me several times how she finds joy in her immense sorrow, knowing her mother’s love is now directly connected to the love of Laurie’s father, John, and her brother, Jeremy.

We don’t understand it. It is a mystery./ I look at pictures of my loved ones who have died, my brother, my grandparents. I can feel their love as I send my love back to them. Frederick Buechner and Henri Nouwen tell us our bodies die, but our mutual love somehow stays with God and is kept for all eternity.

 So Karen gifted her love to each of us. It is also now part of the enlarging love of God/ in her eternal life. If you are a mystic, you have no difficulty understanding this. But this is a difficult concept to comprehend by rational thinking.

This same belief is in a closing sentence from Thornton Wilder’s fictional book, The Bridge of San Luis Rey( Sand Louise ray), where five people die on a bridge in South America. British Prime Minister Tony Blair read the passage at the memorial service in New York/ for British victims of the attack on the World Trade Center.//“There is a land of the living/ and a land of the dead/ and the bridge is love,/ the only survival,/ the only meaning.” (Repeat)1

I know in my heart that Karen’s love will always endure with each of us/ and in all eternity. Her Love is always there inside of us as we carry it forward to transform ourselves, transform others, //and transform the universe./ My heart tells me this mystery is true, and I think you know it as well, because this is what Karen’s life taught us./

Unfortunately, the Bible does not answer most of our questions about resurrection. It refuses to approach resurrection as something rational for us to understand in our lifetime.2

However, in this mysterious universe, what we do know is that those who mean most to us// mean EVEN MORE to God. In God’s way, God keeps them, and because God keeps them, we are never separated from them, or they from us.3///

It is an early Christian tradition4 to tell stories about the one who has died as the body is on its pilgrimage to its final burial place. Keep telling all you meet Karen stories./ This is one way we continue to share her love. We tell stories because Christians believe that death changes/but does not destroy. Death5 is not a period at the end of a sentence, but more like a comma/where we go on to a new relationship with God AND with those we love. Our God of love does not give us a loving relationship, and then stop it abruptly, as with Karen’s death. This loving relationship is still there, but in some different form of love. We tell stories of Karen to remember her, as seen through that prism of her life,/ as refractions of God’s love and grace/ in glad and sorrowful memories.////

This morning, as we carry our dear friend’s ashes, in and out of this sacred space, we sac/ra/men/tally take her back to God.4 We know she already is with God, but this funeral lit/ur/gy allows us to shout a prayerful petition, “God, get ready! Here comes Karen! A sinner of your own redeeming,/ a lamb of your own flock. You gave her to us, and now with gratitude for the gift of her life, we return her to you.”/

“God of grace and glory, we remember today our sister, Karen. We thank you for giving her to us, to know and love as a companion on our earthly pilgrimage.

And now O God,6 who loves us/ with a greater love than we can know or understand:/ We give you the highest praise and hearty thanks for the excellent example of your servant, Karen, who now is in the larger life of your heavenly Presence;/ who here on this earth was a tower of strength, who stood by us,/ helped us,/ cheered us by her sympathy, and encouraged us by her example;/ who looked not disdainfully on the outward appearance, but lovingly into the hearts of each of us; who rejoiced to serve all people;/ whose loyalty was steadfast,/ and friendship unselfish and secure; whose joy it was to know You/ and be of service. Grant that Karen may continue to find abiding peace and wisdom in your heavenly kingdom, and that we may carry forward her unfinished work for you on this earth;/ through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

1Thornton Wilder. The Bridge of San Luis Rey (HarperCollins, 1927), p. 107.

2Heaven. edited by Roger Ferlo (Seabury Books, 2007).

3 Theodore Farris. Death and Transfiguration (Forward Movement 1998).

4Thomas Long, “O Sing to Me of Heaven: Preaching at Funerals” in Journal for Preachers, vol. 29, No. 3, Easter 2006, pp.21-26.

5Edward Gleason. Dying we Live (Cowley 1990).

6 J. B. Bernardin. Burial Services (Morehouse 1980) p. 117.